Tings are unraveling in the final volume of The Dust Trilogy, the next of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a world that appears, here more than ever, as a energized and slanted version of our own. Establishments are failing, or reorganizing themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Control is flowing away from governments, and pooling in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of corporations, the grasp of rioters. "An element is at work, silently, gradually", says businessman Mustafa Bey, keeping a watchful eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an city cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and strong are weakening and collapsing."
Key Puzzle and Her Quest
Exactly what that element might be, and how to counteract it, is the question that propels this final volume, which picks up where the previous book ended. This is, reportedly, the author's concluding venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating universe he first revealed three decades past, with the launch of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and behave like us, but are paired by daemons, souls in animal form; where the skies are teeming with enchantresses and mythical beasts, but underneath, vehicles are caught and beverages is sipped, and older scholars carry fancy shopping bags. Our heroine, whom we first introduced to as a child in the first trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in La Belle Sauvage, the origin story with which the author began this trilogy, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and tenacious protagonist of the earlier books, but older, melancholic, more careful, less certain. This limitation is heightened by her split from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the trigger which made him desert her in the first place.
Interwoven Plots
The daemon's resolve to depart in search of that innocent part of Lyra which she appears to have shed (an trait which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to reconnect with him, were the catalysts of its predecessor, which followed the protagonist undertake a picaresque journey across the continent and into the mountain region, facing with amazement and risk on the way. But from the start, profound shifts were in action, and malevolent elements at work. The Magisterium – the church's ruling body, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – Lyra's family member, who holds responsible her for his sister's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of president of the church's ruling assembly, and is determined on using his fresh power to broaden the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a overflowing Thames as an young boy in the first book, is now an Oxford don with a sideline in espionage: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's intentions. And beneath all of this is the mystery surrounding the scarce and precious rose oil which seems in some way to be the origin of a societal and economic crisis spreading out from that area. The extract is viewed by certain groups as a tradeable good, by different parties as a research-based or mystical wonder, and by further factions – the fanatical "highland figures" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be eradicated. The question of its source, what it stands for, and if it should be destroyed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to His Dark Materials, the heroine's actions, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably linked with the future of the realm
In the previous volume, these storylines ran mostly in side by side. In The Rose Field, they merge. Similar to His Dark Materials, Lyra's choices and her destiny are shown to be inextricably linked with the future of the world. Her private journey to rejoin with her companion and regain her creativity becomes the primary conflict in a broader war with an controlling system which, as these systems often attempt, is striving to suppress freedom of thought, originality and culture: all the internal, defiant ways in which individuals can be independent.
Dimensional Rifts and Ideological Conflicts
The book starts with the discovery of a set of unusual fissures in the fabric of the world's atmosphere: windows that look to lead to alternate realities. An example of a window seems to be the point of the highly contested mystical extract. The church, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these portals as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As Lyra begins to shift from inflexible rationalism and revert to feeling, however, her conviction that these locations must be protected – that their meaning and their value is in some way vital – grows. "Dust, or rose oil, or the imagination, or the botanical realm, or whatever we name it," she says, "it is necessary." The setting for a Blakean conflict between purity and maturity is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
